Ever since organic light emitting diodes were first tested at Kodak in the 1970s, consumers have been waiting for the technology to get affordable enough to infiltrate home electronics.

The benefits over LCD and plasma displays is obvious: the colors are far richer, the blacks darker, and there are massive savings benefits to the technology when it comes to power sipping.

Unfortunately, OLEDs still are too expensive to bring to the home theater system. But according to Korean company LG, who are bringing a 15-inch OLED display to Asia later this year, the prices of the panels should fall dramatically in the next seven years.

Forty-inch and larger OLED panels will be fairly expensive in 2012, but they will be available in the market,” said Won Kim, VP of OLED sales and marketing, at a trade show in Japan yesterday. “OLED panels will cost less than LCD panels in 2016.”

It’s good to have a date to circle on a calendar on when most of us can afford to go OLED, but that’s still a depressingly far off date. Cheap OLED displays are needed now, particularly for notebook computers and cell phones, whose energy requirements go up every year with little to no evolution in battery capacity technology. We’re already living in the era of the smart phone that needs to be charged once a day, but we could be only a few years from living in the era of the smart phone that needs to be charged every few hours. There’s nothing consumer gadgets need right now more than more energy efficient screens and more advanced battery technology.